Isadora Duncan Quotes
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All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture.
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The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
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For I was never able to understand, then or later on, why, if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it. For I have never waited to do as I wished. This has frequently brought me to disaster and calamity, but at least I have had the the satisfaction of getting my own way.
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So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.
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People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.
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The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body.
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Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps... The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough... I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.
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I finally discovered the source of all movement, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born.
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I am seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body's movement.
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The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
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Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.
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The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise
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Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
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I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.
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The Dance - it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.
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My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the wave.
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There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them.
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You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.
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Master technique, so that technique NEVER prevents you from dancing.
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With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.
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The noblest art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets. Only the dancer has forgotten it, who should remember it, as the instrument of [the dance] art is the human body itself.
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The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of her soul...This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of herself and out of something greater than all selves.
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If I could explain, I wouldn't need to dance!
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These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.
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To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.
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I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.
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All my lovers have been geniuses; it's the one thing that I insist.
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What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
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Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.
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Memories are less tangible than dreams.
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